Unfortunately, this is true. If I can’t find a bass score for a song I want to play, I just write my own using my ears and the chord chart. I can usually come quite close to the original this way.
My point about “reliance” refers to those who are so reliant on tab that they feel helpless if the only thing available for a song is standard sheet music. They’ve learned the instrument by playing tab (as I did), and have become so used to being told which string or fret to play, they’re lost if they have to make that decision on their own. The Sight Reading course is a remedy for that, and I’m very glad I took it.
I definitely agree that everyone should learn to read music. It’s not difficult and you don’t need to sight read to get immense value out of it. I always try and find scores for stuff I want. I wish more were available. It’s also really useful for just communicating.
And if there is good sheet music availability, sight reading is a valuable skill. I really should work on it more for keyboards.
But for bass, unfortunately there just isn’t a lot of readily available scores for many genres. It’s too bad, but it’s how it is for nearly everything I am interested in playing.
The reason I was curious is because I was playing around with some of the synths in AL and tried playing from some of the piano sheet music I have (grand staff), and some of it came off sounding rather bizarre LOL. I was just wondering if that’s what synth players in bands use.
For our own stuff I never used sheet music - no need; I recorded and/or sequenced it all via MIDI and had available that way.
Sequencers are a software/hardware tool that is like a DAW but limited to recording MIDI. The UI looks like the piano roll MIDI editor in a DAW. Before DAWs, they were all we had. They are still useful for some things (usually in hardware).
The software ones can print sheet music of the recorded MIDI if it is ever needed. As can Reaper and other DAWs for that matter.
LOL. I guess if you ever wanted sheet music for a tab, you could go to one of the good tab sites, see if there was a MIDI file available (if the site has a player there probably is), then download that and import it into Reaper on a track, and click the Standard Notation icon
Actually I bet all sheet music software can import MIDI too.
Hmmm I must have a different version of Reaper. I don’t have any icons in the upper right corner of the interface. I’ll look around though.
This is a good topic for the Reaper thread
It’s really hard to get through with this to some people. Playing for musical theatre, cruise ships or whatever that requires sight reading is just a whole different thing that most people are not going to ever be doing. Much more useful skills for people are ear training and being able to use scales to improvise over chords. Reading standard notation does pretty much nothing to improve one’s musicality. I can sight read tab unless it’s extremely difficult/fast but i rarely work on anything long enough to bother learning it
So like musical notation on virtually every other instrument without strings (yes i know there are alternate fingerings on woodwinds). You must hate playing piano without that freedom of choice… I don’t care what package the music comes in, when i read tab i can still make any of the same choices I’d make from standard notation but I don’t want to if I don’t have to because I’m lazy/efficient. My goal is to play music, not read music. You’re like photographers that think you have to shoot everything in manual so you can be in control of everything.
Unless you’re writing/improvising your own music, you’re getting told what to do no matter how you get the notes from the page to your fingers. In an orchestra setting, the goal is to play everything exactly as it’s written/directed, every time you play it and that’s why classically trained musicians suck so much at jazz and improvisation.
Yes you can import midi into guitar pro to make tabs or standard notation. For backing tracks, I usually write stuff there first and then import it into Reaper or one of my plugins like EZDrummer or EZkeys. Anthemscore will export to standard notation too.
It’s kind of a shame that tab got created in my opinion. It is effectively a different and less capable language for music. It has somewhat separated guitar/bass from the rest of the musical world. Obviously most upright bass pieces are on notation, but with frets came tab. The tab with note durations is pretty good but you don’t see that as much. I dread the ones without any note durations or even bar separations.
Nothing wrong with using tab though now that it exists. Most electric bass music is in it so you might as well use it. And sight reading tab is useful too. Doesn’t have to be notation. Also the more you can sight read, the quicker you can transcribe/compose music too.
It’s pretty easy to understand why it was invented for guitar. Guitar sheet music for chords can be messy and standard notation is really not amenable to the way guitarists think about some things, especially strumming patterns. Tablature and chord charting or lead sheets often make a lot more sense for guitar.
Why it carried over to bass is a good question. Probably guitarists moving to bass
Actually I am willing to bet that is why. Relatively few guitarists ever need to learn standard notation, so they brought tab with them to bass when their band found a better guitarist and they needed to be the bass player instead.
Tablature is OLDER than standard notation and it continues to be popular because it’s MORE capable of notating music for a specific instrument. There are many instruments, especially outside of western music, where it’s significant to note where the note is to be played.
Standard notation was created because it was good when composing/playing for many instruments, not because it’s the best for any one instrument. Similarly, we have concert pitch and transposing instruments to make things easier. When composing for orchestras, you want uniformity. Tab for guitar/bass was a simple aide to ear learning pieces so it didn’t need note duration and all that jazz. Most people are interested in playing music, not spending a whole bunch of time becoming musicians.
I’m going to call bs on sight reading being much of an aide to transcription/composition. You don’t need any system of recording music in order to become proficient at learning/composing songs and the world is full of professional musician who have done exactly that. The world was full of great story tellers before the common folk learned to read and write. Reading books doesn’t make you good at writing them or most of us would be fantastic authors.
